1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of network connectivity and multimedia protocols and more particularly to managing connectivity through a reverse proxy.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. Nevertheless, the real-time delivery requirements of audio and video have strained the infrastructure of the Internet in its ability to support multimedia collaboration.
Along with the dramatic rise in Internet usage over the past decade, a correspondingly dramatic increase in hacking and unauthorized accessing of data over the Internet has been observed. In response, contemporary network architecture theory incorporates network elements tasked with the security of discrete portions of the Internet. Typical network elements include firewalls, SOCKS proxies, HTTP proxies, network obfuscation units such as network and port address translation, and the like. The use of these network elements, however, can complicate the accommodation of collaborative computing technologies. In particular, the disposition of a security device in the path of real-time data transmissions can interrupt if not completely block the flow of the real-time data from source to sink.
One type of network security element, the reverse proxy, can be used to protect a cluster of servers from discretionary access by clients residing in the Internet. The reverse proxy can protect the cluster of servers by forcing external clients to connect to individual servers within the cluster only through the reverse proxy. The reverse proxy itself can manage authentication, address translation and monitoring of data flowing through the reverse proxy in order to ensure protocol integrity. In this regard, the reverse proxy only can support the HTTP protocol.
Real-time Internet conferencing technologies rely heavily upon asynchronous message exchanges between client and server. To support receiving asynchronous messages from the server, a real-time conferencing client must maintain a persistent connection to the server. When a reverse proxy has been disposed between the real-time conferencing client and the conferencing server, data can be transferred between client and server only by simulating a persistent connection using the HTTP protocol. Simulating a persistent connection, however, can be difficult where embedded hyperlinks to active code within markup served across the reverse proxy do not comport with the proxy rules required to route requests to servers behind the reverse proxy. In this circumstance, from the perspective of the real-time conferencing client, the conferencing server will appear to be unavailable.